Bring them home

JOHN VAN DOORN - Staff Writer

I saw a man in a filthy yellow jacket, a big man whose shoes had
no soles (were they then still shoes, or were they spats from
grandpa's day?) and whose feet were so swollen they had no form,
and whose speech was so twisted it was all coughs and wails, and I
know that every day he stood at the back of a little restaurant on
Mission Avenue and made noises and pretty soon an arm came out the
door and gave him coffee and a piece of pastry, and that was
that.

He was a homeless man who had found a way to make it
through.

He slept beside the railroad tracks, or probably did; I wasn't
there at night to check up on him. But every morning his spot next
to a green generator was pocked with paper and cans and bags of
unknown treasures, and he sat or lay among them until the sun
burned bright. And I figured he called that sad collective
home.

He would not say how he looked upon it. I parked a couple of
times and tried to talk to him, but he was wounded, sorely wounded.
There was no blood and there were no broken bones, but he was hurt
and I wondered what kind of surgeon it would take to fix him.

I saw pain in his eyes the depth of which I had not seen since a
friend came one day in absolute despair to tell me his boy had been
run over by a car and killed. It came to me that this homeless
dirty man in the yellow jacket may also have seen the death of a
boy, himself, long, long ago.

He couldn't have had many joyful yesterdays, that was clear. I
tried to give him money, but he took it only once and other times
refused it. That's a busy street there, and people would stop to
ask what they could do, or to bring him a pizza or heavy socks and
good shoes they had guessed the size of.

He'd cough and wail, sometimes letting the gifts be put in his
hands but more often turning his back on the offerings. The givers
were on to him, and they'd put the food or the clothes on the
ground beside him, and head back to their own lives where the food
was warmer and the textiles richer.

This was a homeless man. For a long time, he was for me the very
face of North County homelessness, although I know well enough, as
do you, that it has many faces and that they belong to young and
old, boys and girls, men and women.

I know that when I drive in the sunlight toward the shore and
pass arroyo and gully, ditch and wood, that each may hold a family
that has slipped through one of the many cracks that cut across the
culture, often where the land looks firm and fertile.

How many homeless are there in the North part of the county, or
the whole county, and how many right on the edge and how many
holding on to a roof with fingertips only, afraid to look down?

Our writer David Fried, who spends many of his days trying to
make sense of the homeless threads scattered through the sheltered
fabric, reported recently that officials estimate there are nearly
10,000 in San Diego County.

Of these, perhaps a third may be found in North County. The
numbers may be right on target or way off; you can find very
sensible people who think they're low. Others say too high. Still
others say that if you are counting the homeless, you can't forget
older people whose meager pensions are just about to push them out
the door of a housing market gone berserk, the median price of a
home now put at more than half a million.

Very decent people and organizations are doing what they can to
build and open shelters. It is not enough, of course. They talk of
50 people here and 75 there, but good intentions don't fill all the
stomachs and build all the walls. They can't find jobs for
everyone. They cannot, in the end, reach down to the nearly lost,
in their thousands, and say that if you grab my hand you will be
fine.

Against the huge numbers of homeless people in big cities, the
few thousand here are not very many. But that is playing the
numbers game, which is soulless. One homeless person is too many.
One wandering mother with two or three kids in tow is too many. One
migrant worker scratching in the fields and gardens to make a few
dollars a day that will not buy him shelter is too many.

If I were a county official, or a city councilman, or some other
illustrious figure, I'll tell you what I'd do.

I'd rearrange the budget so that every homeless person had a
place to live and something to eat and a chance to get educated and
a job to go to.

I'd see to it that doctors and nurses dropped by whenever they
were needed, and I'd insist they be cheery and at least look as if
they loved what they were doing.

I'd search the country just to find that perfect someone who
knew what hope was, and how to explain it so that even if the words
got highfalutin the message found the heart.

I'd bring that man or woman to the great shelters and apartments
and houses and schools where all the homeless were by that time,
and I'd say, Tell them what hope is. Give them some hope. Take your
time.

I'd see to it that public policy and the great benefits of
American life poured through the doors. I'd make all my workers
forget race and color and immigration status, their tasks made
simple: Get everyone a piece of the action, just like us. Help me,
I'd say, kill off the statistics, the god-awful numbers that ought
to embarrass us to tears, or make them read zero, zero, zero.

Help me change the dingy corners where some of the homeless find
themselves, trying to beg but afraid to, and take the
disenfranchised home.

That's about what I'd do, if I were the leader of the land. It
is utopian, perhaps a bit wacko, but so was the Social Security
system when Franklin Roosevelt said we should have it. If we are
not our brothers' keepers, we are not much at all, it seems to
me.

I know that I don't want to see the man in the filthy yellow
jacket anymore. I don't want to see his half-shoes and his
tormented stare, not because I am offended by him but because he
reminds me of the offense that we —- the larger we, the
governmental we, the civilized we —- have dealt him, which is not
to care.

He is gone now. I had not seen him for a long time, maybe three
months. But then I did, and he was not on Mission anymore, not in
Escondido or across the street in San Marcos. He was in Oceanside,
shambling along in a yellow jacket a shade dirtier. I heard him
cough and wail, and a carful of kids honked and laughed.